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LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 



BY 

ELLEN HAYES 



BOSTON 

GEO. H. ELLIS CO. 

1909 



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Copyright, 1909 
By Ellen Hayes 



Geo. H. Ellis Co., Printers 




So enter 

that daily thou mayest become more learned and thoughtful. 

So depart 

that daily thou mayest become more useful to thy country and 

to mankind. 

Inscription on the White Gateway, Cornell University. 

Truth is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to be 
whispered over rose-water after dinner when the ladies are gone 
away. — W. K. Clipford. 

That great social duty, — to impart what we believe, and what 
we think we have learned. — Harriet Martineau. 



FIRST LETTER. 

Camp Alcyone, 
Nineteen hundred and x. 
Dear Margaret: 

Yes, I approve, although for some reasons I wish 
you were going with your brother to your father's uni- 
versity. Since a decision has been reached, we need 
not now discuss those reasons. Neither will we talk 
about the preparation you have made. Beyond a doubt 
it might well have been somewhat different; but there 
was no course left you except to meet the require- 
ments at present specified by colleges. Let us look 
forward and plan for the years ahead rather than re- 
view those of the high school from which you have 
just been graduated. 

In entering a college, any college, you are in reality 
joining a club. One distinguishing feature of mem- 
bership is that you are to leave home and reside 
at your club quarters for most of the time for four 
years. What you hear called "college life" is merely 
the special variety of social activities that characterize 
the community you are about to enter. From what 



LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 



you write I see that you are looking forward to it with 
eagerness. You think that residence in the great 
home of the club will afford you opportunity for 
"good times" that you have never yet enjoyed, happy 
as your home life has been. I am not going to under- 
rate that good time. I am glad it is coming to you. 
Every one ought to be glad that some hundreds of 
girls here and there are finding the happiness of the 
large comradeship that a college affords. This world 
has not been kind to girls. It has made life hard for 
them for more thousands of years than history exactly 
knows. They have been denied freedom and knowl- 
edge, they have had to please and obey; and at this 
present hour the vast majority of them are so restricted 
that they are little better off than slaves. Do you 
remember in Miss Scidmore's China: The Long- 
lived Empire, the account of a visit to a provincial 
yamun ? — 

What did they have to talk about, these helpless, crippled 
women with their scores of maids, spending all their lives on the 
hard chairs, hard beds, and hard floors in these cheerless rooms, 
looking on stone courts and blank walls? Without exercise, 
incidents, books, occupation, or any social excitements save 
these stilted visits in closed sedans, it seemed a dreary prison 
life at best, and the oppressive idea made us long to escape from 
the harem's walls. 



FOREWORD 



What kind of a life do you suppose the Chinese re- 
gard as an appropriate preparation for the women's 
years as thus described? But you do not need to go 
to China for dark pictures of the lives of girls and 
women. They may be found in every land, including 
your own. The truth is, you are one of the girls, 
comparatively few in number, who have escaped into 
liberty. You may learn what you please; you may go 
where you please; you may marry or not, as you please. 
Some day it will be well worth your while to set to 
work and find out how it comes that you are thus 
fortunate. It is a long story. 

"Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we 
Breathe cheaply in the common air." 

Do not imagine, however, that you are a free human 
being to the extent that your brother is. In a later 
letter I may explain what I mean by this warning. 
Just now I am bidding you be glad of the coming col- 
lege life. 

There will be snow-shoe clubs and hockey teams, 
papers to edit and class politics to "dabble in." Take 
your share of it all. For instance, you enjoy theatri- 
cals. I recall your dramatization of Lochinvar when 
you were eleven years old. Others like you will com- 
bine for that kind of fun. Play Orlando or Sir Lucius 



LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 



O'Trigger, if you wish; join the golf club; accept a 
class office, if it comes your way. Do any of these 
things — provided. Provided what? I hear you ask. 
First of all, do not forget that your health is a most 
precious possession. Just to feel well is a fundamental 
source of happiness. You will certainly be defeating 
yourself if for some present pleasure you endanger 
or impair that good health of yours. You need plenty 
of sleep. Some persons never seem to be quite awake 
or wholly asleep. Do sleep so that when you are 
awake you may be wide-awake. It is not hard to 
find out when and what you ought to eat. Experi- 
ence and the lecturer on hygiene will give you tempo- 
rary directions that must serve until you elect physiol- 
ogy. As for clothes, woman's dress has been de- 
clared "the disgrace of civilization." It truly is. A 
class of persons none too strong at best persists in a 
mode of dress that still further impairs their strength, 
and consequently diminishes both their happiness 
and their efficiency. Get into your gymnasium dress 
and then frankly say what you think of the long, en- 
tangling skirts from which you are for the moment 
free. Enter for the college relay race or a ride into 
the Grand Canon by the Bright Angel trail, and see 
how the managers rate your conventional costume. 



FOREWORD 



It may be said that we walk rather than run through 
life, and a canon trail is not our usual thoroughfare. 
Well, watch yourself going upstairs with an armful 
of books, or crossing a street on a windy day, or per- 
forming any of the common acts that may reasonably 
be expected of persons having arms and legs. The 
introduction and establishment of a mode of dress 
suited to the modern civilized woman is one of those 
major reforms which we must await with what patience 
we can command. In the mean time we ought to avail 
ourselves of such relief as the proprieties permit. If 
the skirt must be a long, harassing gear, it may be 
reduced to a minimum number of pounds, and it may 
have pockets. One can move in good society in low- 
heeled shoes, and even wear a cap in a snow-storm 
without inviting remark. Of course, a whole book 
could be written, many have been written, on this sub- 
ject of health preservation; and I am only writing 
a letter. Let me just add that club life carries its own 
penalty. You are a member of a crowd. To hold on 
to yourself becomes an urgent duty. Nothing will 
satisfy your nerves except such consideration for them 
that you may never know you have any. If you can- 
not assume the role of Portia or edit a paper or preside 
at a class meeting without nervous excitement, let 



lO LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

Portia and the paper and the class take care of them- 
selves. And in any case, all these matters together 
merit only the merest fraction of your time and energy. 
There is a region on the moon named by Galileo 
Mare Serenitatis. On this earth also, for those who 
search, there are seas of serenity. Camp out on their 
shores, come what will. 



.* 



SECOND LETTER. 

Your freshman letters remind me of Alice's singing 
'^ Here we go round the mulberry bush.'' It is a long, 
long time since you joined the club. Upper class 
students have evidently been trying to make you 
"feel at home," and to that end they have instructed 
you in the content of college life — as they view it. 
But is "college life" the whole life of a college ? Con- 
certs, suppers, theatricals, games, receptions, sere- 
nades, society-house parties, athletics, — do these in 
your pre-collegiate impressions and freshman vistas 
make up the bulk of the club's doings? Are these 
matters in the aggregate the purpose of the plant 
that people call a "Foundation for Learning"? It 
would almost seem so if we are to judge not merely 
by students' letters, but by published reports in papers 
and magazines. One wonders whether it would 
not be franker and more economical to eliminate 
altogether certain other features, — a curriculum, re- 
quirements for the B.A. degree, laboratories and 
libraries. There might be some art lectures and 
music lessons and instructions for reading modern 



LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 



novels, but nothing that should seriously interfere 
with a glorious four years of fun. It is a fact, how- 
ever, and not at all surprising when you come to 
think about it, that the very persons who most eagerly 
give prominence to the social part of their student life 
would most strongly resent trimming a college or a 
university down to the lines of a summer hotel. They 
recite with some pride the names of eminent pro- 
fessors of the past, even though they have little "use 
for" the greatest teachers of their own time. They 
want somebody to study, though they themselves 
have no intention of making any personal contribu- 
tion to the intellectual life of their school. They 
have bargained and paid for the distinction of an 
academic connection, and this no ordinary social club 
could give. To the stately robe of learning they cling 
for prestige and for a sweet sense of superiority to 
common men and women who could not go to college. 
What you write about the societies and other or- 
ganizations leads me to repeat here something that 
I took occasion to say elsewhere not long ago: — 

The unpeaceful activities of the community have invaded 
the college. Exponents of Movements, Reforms, Causes, appear 
at all academic gates, eager to inherit a land of so much promise. 
They frankly avow their desire to "interest," to "enlist," to 



COLLEGE ACTIVITIES I3 

organize, students. With no intention of doing injury, repre- 
senting movements perhaps very good in themselves, these 
propagandists make damaging inroads on time, energy, strength, 
and feeling. Their argument is plausible, their plea for "work- 
ers" impressive. The student in the woman's college is made 
to feel that now, without delay, she should be an active sharer 
in the movements astir in the world. Under a mistaken con- 
ception of "service" she readjusts her ratios of academic and 
non-academic engagements. There is a convention, a "rally," 
and she rallies. There is committee work, and she hastens to 
obey a committee call or to call a committee, as the case may 
be. "To meet people," "to learn how to do things," "to broaden 
her life by knowing something besides books," — these specious 
arguments too often chime in with her own desires and appeal 
to her as wisdom and common sense. And never for one little 
minute is she assailed by the suspicion that these intrusive en- 
terprises of her college life are not worth her while. She does 
not know the cost of her various social efforts, nor will she ever 
know. To be permanently incapable of perceiving her mis- 
take is part of the cost. It is readily admitted that a student 
should be informed concerning modern social movements. The 
main facts of their origin, purpose, growth, and prospects, may 
well be considered in a course in sociology; but this is by no 
means the same thing as engaging practically in them. What 
usually happens is that the student is induced to take part in 
the work of a given movement while remaining ignorant of its 
genetic antecedents and relationships. The same person later, 
when out of college, will with alacrity help to engineer a charity 
ball, but she will quite fail to study the deep-lying conditions that 



14 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

have made her charity ball an apparent necessity. We do not 
want, on the one hand, unpractical students retiring to a corner 
to read Plato and Goethe in the original, pedantic rather than 
intellectual; nor, on the other, restive young persons who patron- 
ize as much of the world as they can reach and call it "min- 
istering." Let us have rather those who are modest and far- 
seeing enough to spend four years in serene, unhasting prepara- 
tion. The battle will keep. Sorrow will not be gone from the 
earth, neither will ignorance nor injustice by the time you are 
really ready for the fight. If the above charge can fairly be 
brought against the nominally serious and unselfish student 
efforts for the betterment of conditions in the world, what shall 
be said of those activities which are designed to give pleasure 
for the hour and which constitute so much of the charm and 
fascination of college life ? If no colleges existed, the society as 
an organization would still be found throughout the world and 
would not lack for ready and eager defenders. But no defence 
can clear away the fact that the formation of a group within the 
group is in reality an expression of primitive anti-social tenden- 
cies. To create an inside, with a correlative outside; to es- 
tablish an exceptional status for the chosen, and hence to con- 
trol benefits, privileges, positional superiority, — this is the 
main element in society organization and membership. The 
society is essentially retrogressive, even when honestly designed 
to promote progress, and it would go to pieces in any community 
that could fairly grasp the idea that there is one brotherhood 
whose membership is all mankind. College societies are no 
exception. Indeed, they exhibit in aggravated form the dis- 
tinctly anti-social features of organizations in general. They 



COLLEGE ACTIVITIES 1$ 



could not exist in a college that had a vision of the ideal relation 
of its members one to another and to the community whence 
they came and to which they are to return. The eagerness of 
freshmen to join something, anything that offers, is only sur- 
passed by the efforts of upper-class students to promote mutually 
exclusive, mystery-enwrapped groups. Fortunately, those pre- 
cious things — culture, friendship — come at the bidding of no 
organization. They are not among any society's assets, to be 
treated like initiation rituals and fraternity pins. 

And yet organizations are sometimes necessary. 
Have you heard the story of the women who scrubbed 
the Chicago sky-scrapers? They were being paid 
ten cents an hour. They asked for fifteen cents and 
a dressing-room where they could change their wet 
clothes before going home. Their employers scouted 
both petitions. Then one little woman with great 
labor organized the scrubbers into a union, and they 
went on strike. The employers could not fill their 
places, and the condition of the floors grew worse 
from day to day. The outcome was that the women 
got seventeen and a half cents an hour and a dressing- 
room in every sky-scraper. 

There are in the world organizations needing what- 
ever help you as a member can some day give, and 
you will need all that they can give you; but they are 
not of any college. This year you have probably 



l6 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

already been importuned to enter certain associations. 
Do not let any one hurry you; take time to consider 
the matter. Next year you may be condescendingly 
invited to join some society. Take more time to con- 
sider. The advantages of membership exist in theory 
rather than in fact; and, even if it were not so, freedom 
from the mere machinery of a society is a good not 
to be lightly surrendered. 



THIRD LETTER. 

Electives! You write me that you are already face 
to face with that question, and you want to know, first 
of all, whether you had better go on with Latin, as 
your high- school teacher advised. How did your 
teacher come to give that advice? Did he look the 
whole field over with you, assigning due weight to 
each subject in a long list, or did he speak from the 
point of view of one whose training has been chiefly 
in Latin and who naturally puts that study first ? In 
fact, does he not regard it as his business to advise 
Latin? Excellent teacher though he may be, I think 
we must discount his judgment. Latin is important; 
but how important ? How many years have you spent 
on it already? Besides the opinion of your teacher, 
you offer two other reasons for continuing this study: 
you feel sure that you can do it. You would so hate 
to incur a "condition" early in your course, and that 
might happen with an untried subject. And, secondly, 
you may want to teach Latin some day. As regards 
the first reason, it is not a very worthy one. To yield 
to the fear of failing is to fail, to begin with. If a new 



l8 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

subject, possibly difficult, but certainly valuable, is pro- 
posed to you for election, elect it. The acquirement 
of a sound and reasonable confidence in yourself is of 
prime importance. As for the second reason, it is not 
yet certain that you are to be a teacher; and, if you are, 
Latin may prove to be the very last subject that you 
will wish to teach. Surely, you ought to wait a year or 
two before permitting this consideration to influence 
you in your choice of studies. "But must I not de- 
cide now, so that I may begin now to fit myself to teach 
some particular subject?" No. If this reply seems 
a trifle summary and dogmatic, I hope to make it less 
so as our correspondence progresses. 

The Latin question is an introductory item in the 
larger question of electives in general. Open almost 
any college or university year book, and you are 
indeed in a wilderness. How is a beginner like 
yourself to find his way? or is there no way? or do 
many ways lead through to the further side ? Let us 
consider. 

You tell me that certain subjects are required for 
the B.A. degree in your college. These we may 
count out, since they are to be a part of your program 
in any case. From that part of the curriculum left — 
which you say is by far the larger part — what shall you 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM IQ 

select? The elective system as it exists to-day in 
American colleges rests on the assumption that one 
subject is as good as another for the undergraduate. 
An immediate corollary is, the student may properly 
elect those subjects that attract him or that he thinks 
he is interested in. As a business scheme, no other 
system can compete with this elective system, and none 
survives to try. Scarcely a college from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific dares reject it, or even modify it to any 
extent. Faculties eyeryvv^here vote for it, and profess 
their delight in it; and, obviously, such a system must 
please undergraduates. Here and there a voice is 
raised in protest, though with small reason for hoping 
to see any immediate reform. The heretics remem- 
ber, however, that majorities are often in the wrong; 
and they have the encouragement of the fact that 
reforms usually begin in the initiative of a few. They 
also have the support of an unfailing principle: "The 
proof of the pudding is in the eating." If the elective 
systemi is "making good," it will endure : if not, neither 
popularity nor authority can save it. In a wiser day 
it must go. "Making good," — the phrase leads us to 
ask. What is it really all for, — this four years' resi- 
dence in an academic club? Various and discordant 
answers may be heard. Without inquiring just now 



LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 



what they are, let us look into the matter for ourselves. 
You have one life to live. Cannot these four years 
be used for the benefit of all the years that are to fol- 
low? Wliat could benefit them? Briefly, whatever 
can make you amount to more as a human being. 
Not a few will assure you that your college training 
should continually recognize that you are a female. 
I beg you to try to realize that first, last, and all the 
time you are a human being. You may become a 
milliner or a doctor of medicine; you may manage a 
farm or establish a studio; you mayor may not be "a 
wife and mother." All these vocations, states in life, 
are incidental compared with the tremendous, abiding 
fact that you are a human being. Those persons, who- 
ever they are, — Luther, Napoleon, this editor, that 
college president, — that would subordinate the fact 
of humanness to the circumstance of sex or occupation, 
suffer from a disqualifying mental twist and moral 
atrophy that cancels any value their judgment might 
otherwise have. Unable, apparently, to think of 
women except as females, they abuse the authority of 
position and the authority of influence in denying and 
delaying to women the right and justice due to a being 
that is human. 

But what is it to be a human being? On one of 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 



those high shelves in your father's library is a volume 
of Hazlitt's Essays with this passage in it: — 

To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched 
ocean, to walk upon the green earth, and to be lord of a thousand 
creatures, to look down giddy precipices or over distant flowery 
vales, to see the world spread out under one's finger in a map, 
to bring the stars near, to view the smallest insects in a micro- 
scope, to read history, and witness the revolutions of empires 
and the succession of generations, to hear of the glory of Sidon 
and Tyre, of Babylon and Susa, as of a faded pageant, and to 
say all these were and are now nothing, to think that we exist 
in such a point of time and in such a corner of space, to be 
at once spectators and a part of the moving scene, to watch the 
return of the seasons, of spring and autumn, to traverse desert 
wildernesses, to listen to the midnight choir, to visit lighted halls 
or plunge into the dungeon's gloom or sit in crowded theatres 
and see life itself mocked, to feel heat and cold, pleasure and 
pain, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, to study the works 
of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony, to worship fame 
and dream of immortality, to have read Shakespeare and to be- 
long to the same species as Sir Isaac Newton. . . . 

The catalogue is not less impressive for its length, 
and it indicates many of man's experiences unshared 
with other creatures. Dogs and eagles and butter- 
flies live their own lives and have their own forms of 
happiness; but, so far as we know, they do not wor- 
ship fame or dream of immortality. However, 



LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 



the experiences here enumerated are for the most 
part those of feeling and action rather than think- 
ing and knowing. It is one thing to feel the thrill 
of belonging to the same species as Sir Isaac Newton: 
it is something else to read the Principia. There 
is more to be said than Hazlitt has said, a long story 
to be told of the hesitant differentiating that carried 
creatures across the vague border-land of the realm 
of the brute animal, so that a human animal came to 
be. Perhaps we can sum up the outcome thus: To 
know something of the past and to infer something 
of the future; to distinguish cause and effect; to 
penetrate motives; to view acts as just or unjust; to 
seek truth and to know when it is found; to become 
acquainted with uniformities of nature; to be free in 
body to come and go, and to choose one's habits and 
activities; and, above all things else, to be free in 
mind, — this it is to be a human being. What can 
four college years do toward the development of a 
life potentially so endowed? 

To begin with, do you think it likely that one 
subject is just as good as another for an under- 
graduate? Current opinion is not evidence. Is it 
not probable that some knowledge is worth more 
than other knowledge? Is it not your duty to your- 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 23 

self to inquire what this most valuable knowledge 
is, and to make yourself possessor of it so far as time 
allows? Further, is it not likely that one branch 
of knowledge depends on another in such a way that 
the primary or basic subject should be learned, and 
learned first? I do not mean to assume the points 
here raised. I only put these doubts into your mind 
in order that you may make inquiry instead of going 
on in the haphazard manner permitted by the elective 
system. What knowledge is of most worth? What 
is primary, and what is secondary? What should 
be given precedence in order of time? It is, of 
course, more important for a mechanical engineer 
to know how to figure the stresses in a bridge than to 
trace the effects of the British occupation of India, 
more important for a surgeon to know how to proceed 
in the setting of a broken limb than to be able to 
describe the exact limits of the anthracite coal meas- 
ures. I am not now referring to technical or pro- 
fessional knowledge, but to the common ground of 
knowledge that should be possessed by human beings, 
apart from the fact that one is an engineer, another 
a surgeon, another a geologist, and so on. "Knowl- 
edge is simply objective truth comprehended by the 
intellect." To put it in another way, it is "acquaint- 



24 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

ance with the environment"; and knowledge comes 
to you through the senses, — yours or some one 
else's. The immediate products of sense-impresses, 
together with inferences and conclusions legitimately 
based on these sense-impresses, form all the knowl- 
edge that we can hope to possess. If at any time 
you think you have come across an exception, be 
sure to let me know. I shall be interested in it. No- 
tice also the difference between the knowing part of 
you and the emotional part. Feeling is not knowing. 
I emphasize this, because, sooner or later, you are 
pretty sure to fall into grave error, if you permit your- 
self to interpret some emotional state as evidence of 
some objective truth. Further, knowledge is to be 
carefully distinguished from opinion. How do you 
prove your proposition? How do you sustain your 
theory? What are the facts in the case? Nowa- 
days these questions indicate the test that must be 
met by any one who sets forth statements with the 
object of having them accepted as true by intelligent, 
thoughtful persons. Refusal to accept opinion save 
as it confesses itself to be mere opinion is a fairly 
accurate indicator of the degree of mental development 
reached by any individual. 



FOURTH LETTER. 

You complain that in my last letter I did not help 
you at all in your difficulty over electives, and you add 
that you suspect I am leading up to a plan for study- 
ing science. That second definition of knowledge 
awakens your suspicions. What is your idea of 
science? You wrote me once that you were having 
physical geography with a teacher who was in your 
school primarily for English, but who had to take the 
geography class because there was no one else to do it. 
She told you one day that she had never studied 
physical geography, — at least she could not remem- 
ber that she had; but then, of course, any one could 
teach such subjects as geography and astronomy. 
You added that you knew other schools where they 
do that way, and your comment was, "This seems 
queer." It does, indeed; but we agreed not to make 
unnecessary remarks about your preparatory school. 
Let us just say that you have not studied any science 
yet, and that you can therefore hardly judge either 
what science is or whether you will like it. Defini- 
tions do not properly come first: however, I am going 



26 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

to give you one now. "Science is the discernment, 
discrimination, and classification of facts, and the dis- 
covery of their relations of sequence." This defini- 
tion is not in the dictionary, but never mind. The 
modern scientific philosopher who framed it has put 
before us in panorama the environment which is the 
concern of science. 

First, we have the constitution of the heavenly bodies, and 
their real and apparent motions to be explained. What are 
they, and how came they to be what they are ? 

Then we have the earth itself; its forms, its lands and seas, 
its mountains and valleys, its rivers and lakes, the winds which 
blow about it, the storms which fall upon it, the lightnings that 
flash athwart the sky, the thunders that roll among the clouds. 
What are all these things, and whence came they, and why are 
they? Again, in the constitution of the earth we find rocks 
with their minerals, and geologic formations with their fossils. 
What are rocks and minerals, formations and fossils, and whence 
came they? 

Look at the innumerable forms of plants covering the earth 
with verdure — the whole vegetable kingdom on the land and 
on the sea; forests, mosses, and confervae. Who shall explain 
the meaning of the phenomena of the vegetable kingdom ? 

The oceans teem with animal life; reptiles crawl over all the 
land; the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the plains, 
are all inhabited by beasts; and the air itself is populated. WTio 
shall tell us of all the living things, and then explain life itself ? 

Turn to the contemplation of man, organized into tribes and 



THE STUDY OF SCIENCE 27 

nations; man possessed of innumerable languages; man engaged 
in arts and industries; man endowed with reason and will ; man 
in search of moral principles to guide his conduct. Whence 
came this man, and whither does he go ? 

Reading this, do you not perceive that it will mean 
deplorable loss if you omit the study of any one of 
these great divisions? You are fortunate if you can 
realize now, in your first college year, that a college 
gives you opportunity for some systematic acquaint- 
ance with the results thus far gained in man's efforts 
to solve the problems presented by the universe. The 
time is all too short, even if you begin without delay 
to avail yourself of that opportunity. Where to begin ? 

When you were quite a little girl you asked one day, 
"Why do the cars lean in when they go round a 
curve?" Another time you wanted to know why we 
took the top off the kerosene can to make the oil pour 
out. The proper beginning is a study of the facts 
involved in the answers to such questions as those 
two of your childhood. Physics is the fundamental 
science. Its principles cannot be resolved into ele- 
ments which are to be referred to other sciences: 
other sciences find in it their foundations. It is also 
true that in learning physics you are not learning that 
which is local, temporary, or merely terrestrial. The 



28 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

formal statement of its principles will endure as long 
as man remains a thinking, investigating, experiment- 
ing creature; and when many matters now deemed 
important shall have become of interest only to the 
archaeologist and the philologian this master science 
will still be to the fore. 

The fabrics of the kingdoms melt away; where Accad and 
where Carthage stood no broken pillar lifts its lonely form to 
mark the spot amid the desert silences. The dust and dreams 
of Caesar mingle with the forgotten ashes of his slaves. But 
Archimedes' lever, the magnetic compass of the dynasty of Tsin, 
the pendulum of Ibn-Junis and Hans Lippershey's far-reaching, 
near-drawing tubes, the balance and retorts of Lavoisier, James 
Watt's labouring giants of steam, Volta's pile and Faraday's 
■whirling magnets are possessions imperishable while civiliza- 
tion their fruit survives. 

If your imagination pictures intelligent inhabitants 
of other worlds in other solar systems, you must 
assign to them a physics identical with the physics 
of this world. Inertia, momentum, kinetic energy, 
wave-motion, are elementary facts in the phenomena 
of their environment as in ours. Now I hear you say, 
"If physics is so fundamental and far-reaching as all 
this, why do not college faculties require its study of 
every student?" Ask the faculties. Wlien the day 
of reckoning comes for the elective system, one grave 



THE STUDY OF SCIENCE 29 

point against it will be the discreditable circumstance 
that, in accordance with it, students were permitted 
to decline to study physics if they so preferred. Men 
have toiled in the laboratory, languished in prison, 
faced torture and the stake itself to win this knowledge 
of environing nature. The consequent benefits are 
accepted without appreciation or gratitude. 

When you begin physics, your teacher will probably 
set you to measuring. On the face of it, how homely 
and dull a task! To be engaged in a study of Ham- 
let's soliloquy, or Socrates' thesis that death is a 
good, or the dramatic signing of the Magna Charta, 
would seem so much more lofty and inspiring. Be 
patient. These matters will come in due time. This 
laboratory work is first because it is fundamental, if 
you ever lay a solid base for learning and culture. It 
contains in itself factors of greater value than mere 
learning or conventional culture. How are you going 
to address yourself to a task making peculiar demands 
for patience, honesty, and painstaking precision? 
Will you be afraid of a vernier or dread a logarithm? 
Will you say, "There! that is good enough; let it go" ? 
Will you detest the effort to find the most nearly cor- 
rect result, when you perceive that results are discord- 
ant? No, I trust not. Fidelity to the duty of using 



3© LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

your own senses and instrumental aids to your senses; 
honesty in interpreting results and in reasoning upon 
them; regard for the facts in a case, — these too deeply 
concern what we call character to admit of mental 
shiftlessness or even manual carelessness. Here, as 
in all other laboratories that you may enter for work, 
you are yourself a subject for an experiment, material 
to be examined. Welcome the test, and fail not. 

Physics has a sister science, chemistry. Closely 
related, they are, however, not interchangeable. One 
cannot be substituted for the other. Have you a 
mind to take several years of physics and omit chem- 
istry altogether? Long before the several years are 
completed your teacher, if he is himself a real student, 
will send you to a neighboring laboratory to learn 
some chemistry. Conversely, your chemistry teacher 
has reason to require of you some sound knowledge 
of physics. The relation of chemistry to physics, 
and the dependence of other sciences, notably the 
biological ones, on chemistry, as well as on physics, 
can be understood only after you have studied them 
individually and connectedly. If no other reason 
existed for learning chemistry, its place in daily life 
justifies its claim on the attention not of a few, but 
of all. A prudent young housewife, desirous of 



THE STUDY OP SCIENCE 3 1 

having everything clean and wholesome, follows 
somebody's advice, and pours carbolic acid into the 
kitchen sink. "What is carbolic acid?" it occurs 
to her to ask. Resort to the Century Dictionary 
results in the information that it is "a substance 
(CgHgOH) found in that part of coal-tar which dis- 
tils over between 329° and 374° F. It has feeble 
acid properties, but in chemical structure is allied 
to the alcohols and belongs to a class of compounds 
called phenols. When pure, it crystallizes in white 
or colorless needles which have the odor of creo- 
sote and a burning taste," and so on. How satis- 
factory! She puts up the dictionary, pleased to 
know just what this useful article, carbolic acid, 
is. She often heard in college that you could "pick 
up science," and this is an illustration that proves 
it. Suppose we examine her. "CeHgOH," what 
does that mean? She does not know, any more 
than if it were expressed in the lost language of the 
Aryans. She can only suspect that it has something 
to do with chemistry; but she never took chemistry, 
not liking the smells of the chemistry 'lab.' And 
what is coal-tar? Her answer shows that she does 
not dream of all that lies behind that innocent-look- 
ing word, coal-tar. "That part of coal-tar." There 



32 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

are other parts, then. What are they? And it is 
the part "which distils over between 329° and 374° 
F." What is distillation? She rather thinks that 
may have something to do with distilleries. And 
that F. ? She has seen it before : it is a kind of ther- 
mometer, though for some reason hers is not gradu- 
ated up to 329°. "The carbolic acid has feeble acid 
properties." What is an acid property? "It is al- 
lied to the alcohols." What are they? "It belongs 
to a class of compounds called phenols. ^^ What is 
a compound? What is a phenol? "It crystallizes." 
What is crystallization? And, finally, what is creo- 
sote? To each and every one of these questions 
she has to say, "I do not know." You will agree 
with me that in spite of her dictionary she cannot 
"pass" in carbolic acid. Perhaps you will say it 
is unkind to pitch upon any subject as difficult as 
carbolic acid to use in tripping up a person. It was 
a random choice. Anything else — a pinch of salt, 
a cake of soap, a piece of chalk — would do. Try 
salt or soap, and see whether she comes out of the 
examination any better, — this young housekeeper, 
who specialized, perhaps, in Romance languages. 
The dictionary has answers, of course, to the above 
questions; but the answers involve more questions. 



THE STUDY OF SCIENCE ^^ 

SO that he who goes "picking up" chemical knowl- 
edge gets deeper and deeper into the mire in the 
struggle to escape intelligent from the first question. 
I admit that the carbolic acid will clean the kitchen 
sink just the same, even if the kitchen manager is 
fashionably ignorant. Nevertheless, on many an oc- 
casion her ignorance will result in annoyance or dis- 
aster. 

But, after practical considerations have emphasized 
the value of chemistry, — since it is essential, in large 
ways and small, to modern civilization, — it is found 
to merit further attention because it constitutes one 
great section of man's acquaintance with his environ- 
ment. Do not let the molecule, marvellous in char- 
acter and behavior, slip through your fingers while 
you are thinking of something else. 



FIFTH LETTER. 

Replying to that last letter I wrote, you remind me 
that there are other sciences besides physics and chem- 
istry, and you ask what you had better do about them. 
What do you think you had better do? Read again 
my long quotation from J. W. Powell. Can you 
mention any class of phenomena with which you are 
willing to remain wholly unacquainted? Suppose 
yourself an inhabitant of a planet belonging, let us 
say, to Fomalhaut or Deneb. We have ample grounds 
for believing that you would find physical and chemi- 
cal phenomena the same there that they are here. A 
prism would refract light there as it does here; oxygen 
would unite with carbon there as it does here; and you 
would find your planet, if undisturbed, moving around 
its primary in an elliptic orbit. That is, in any world 
where ether is a medium for wave-motion, where the 
gravitational stress exists, where heat flows from a 
hotter body to a cooler one, where chemical elements 
are present, the experiences making up the life history 
of that world must be generically what they are here. 
On the other hand, we may well doubt whether any 



THE STUDY OF SCIENCE 35 

other planet has had, in detail, just such a career as 
our own. The deeps of the oceans, the peaks of the 
Andes and Himalayas, the Amazon and the Nile, 
the Grand Canon and the Gobi Desert, are individual 
and characteristic features. How did they come to 
be? 

In the sixteenth century a Dane, Peter Severinus, 
gave some advice in this impetuous fashion: — 

Go my sons, sell your lands, your houses, your garments and 
your jewelry; burn up your books. On the other hand, buy 
yourselves stout shoes, get away to the mountains, search the 
valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest re- 
cesses of the earth; mark well the distinctions between animals, 
the differences among plants, the various kinds of minerals, 
the properties and mode of origin of everything that exists. 
Be not ashamed to learn by heart the astronomy and terrestrial 
philosophy of the peasantry. Lastly, purchase coals, build 
furnaces, watch and experiment without wearying. In this 
way and no other will you arrive at a knowledge of things and 
their properties. 

Men have taken the advice. Some of them, out- 
fitted with hammers, compasses, maps and barom- 
eters, as well as "stout shoes," have got away to the 
mountains: they have searched the valleys, the deserts, 
the shores of the sea. Hardships and risks have not 
daunted these intrepid geologists. The result of their 



36 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

labors is to-day a wonderful history of the earth's 
life. Compared with Jupiter or Saturn, this is not 
much of a planet; but it is your own home planet. 
Will you feel quite satisfied to go up and down it for 
some seventy years and remain deaf to the long, long 
story, blind to the pictured page? You are planning 
to visit, some day, the Yellowstone Park and the Alps. 
However much you may think you enjoy those regions, 
you will see, but understand not, and your enjoyment 
will be far less than it might be if you fail to study 
geology. Even if you never travel, you cannot find a 
spot to live in that is unconnected with a history whose 
backward reach is measured in terms of millions of 
years. Erosion and deposition and peneplain, anti- 
cline and syncline and fault, water-worn pebble and 
embedded fossil, — what are these and what do they 
signify? Do you think that ability to speak French 
and German will in any degree make up to you for 
ignorance of the language of Mother Earth? 

But your planet is not merely a world of compressed 
rock and running waters, of storm and earthquake 
and lava outpour. It is a world of life. Forests and 
plains, hills and valleys, ponds and oceans, and the air 
itself are populated. The phenomena of life, whether 
the life be manifested in animal or vegetal forms, are 



THE STXIDY OF SCIENCE 37 

peculiarly complex. Problems of structure and func- 
tion and nourishment, of distribution and habitats^ 
of variation and adaptation, have called for all that one 
may muster of patience and intellectual effort. Other 
sons of Severinus, the botanist and zoologist, have 
been not less faithful and brave than the geologist; 
and out of their labors have come the great life sciences. 
If you will take that general course in zoology and that 
first year of botany, you will secure at least an intro- 
duction to those sciences. Tell me afterwards what 
you think of the fortuitous device known as the elec- 
tive system whereby you might so easily have missed 
it all. "But it has a lovely blood-vascular system," 
said a zoology student once to a companion who 
expressed disgust at the sight of an earthworm on 
the sidewalk. Some real study at a laboratory table 
makes a surprising change in persons who had before 
felt only contempt for the lowly forms of life. This 
change alone is worth all the cost of a zoology course, — 
the equipment, the time, the instruction of a skilful 
teacher. 

The study of the human body, following directly 
upon the study of general zoology, has its own pe- 
culiar claim to make. We are in a world where the 
living organism is invaded by disease and pain, and 



38 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

finally by death. How can pain be averted or less- 
ened; disease mastered or, better, forestalled; death's 
coming delayed? There are many people, even 
to-day, who think it is not quite "nice" to know 
about one's own body. The medical practitioner 
and the investigator may with propriety study tissues, 
organs, and physiological processes; for the laity, 
however, an assortment of hygiene maxims and 
rule-of-thumb directions is deemed sufficient. "You 
must," and "you must not." But an epidemic of 
typhoid fever in a community is a stern teacher; and, 
before it departs, more than one troubled learner 
wishes he really knew something about stomachs 
and intestines. It is quite time that the day of dog- 
matic hygiene were brought to a close. Can you 
explain to a ten-year-old boy why he must not shed 
his usual winter underclothing some raw April morn- 
ing? Do you know enough of the structure of the 
human foot and the human back to really make it 
clear to your younger sister why she must not wear 
those dear high-heeled shoes? Do you even under- 
stand exactly why your sleeping-room windows are 
to be kept open at night? Until you can deal in- 
telligently with these questions, you may very prop- 
erly postpone acquaintance with pre-Shakespearian 
drama. 



THE STUDY OF SCIENCE 39 

It is an abrupt transition from the studies that 
relate to the care and comforting of these human 
bodies to the study of suns and planets. Astronomy 
is spoken of as the oldest and grandest of the sciences. 
How old is it? Its dawning antedates, perhaps, 
the mechanics of the men who raised monoliths in 
the desert before there was a sphinx to keep guard. 
It may be older even than the agriculture of the one 
who first purposely strewed a handful of wild grain 
outside the entrance to his cave or prehistoric wick- 
iup. But mere age is not sufficient reason for the 
honor accorded to this science. Its true nature and 
claims are set forth in these words by the author of 
the Mecanique Celeste: — 

Astronomy considered in its entirety is the finest monument 
of the human mind, the noblest essay of its intelHgence. Se- 
duced by the illusions of the senses and of self-pride, for a long 
time man considered himself as the center of the movement of 
the stars; his vain-glory has been punished by the terrors which 
its own ideas have inspired. At last the efforts of several cen- 
turies brushed aside the evil which concealed the system of 
the world. We discover ourselves upon a planet, itself almost 
imperceptible in the vast extent of the solar system; which in 
its turn is an insensible point in the immensity of space. The 
sublime results to which this discovery has led should suflSce 
to console us for our extreme littleness, and the rank which it 



40 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

assigns to the earth. Let us treasure with solicitude, let us 
add to it as we may, this store of higher knowledge, the most 
exquisite treasure of thinking beings. 

And yet the majority of students decline to study 
astronomy. It might prove difficult, and — disturb- 
ing thought — it might have some mathematics in it. 
These same students cannot give an intelligent ac- 
count of the cause of the change of seasons; they can- 
not give any account at all of their own watches as 
the astronomical instruments that they are. They 
cannot tell Jupiter from Sirius; and as for the stars 
as suns with attendant worlds, their sizes, distances, 
motions, and constitutions; the galaxy, nebulae, — 
what claim have these things on persons absorbed in 
the little play of their brief hour ? 



SIXTH LETTER. 

In what has gone before I have spoken of science 
only as a body of knowledge, the achievement of the 
human intellect in discerning, discriminating, and 
classifying facts, and in discovering their relations of 
sequence. But, in so far as science is presented to you 
for study in college, quite half its value resides in the 
method of science. Wliat is this method? In out- 
line it is this : A fact, or group of facts discriminatingly 
classified, claims the observer's attention. Viewed 
as an effect, it is required to find antecedent facts which 
have operated as cause. A hypothesis — that is, a pro- 
visional solution of this causal problem — is framed: 
perhaps several are framed. Then more observa- 
tions must be made or experiments performed, to 
test these hypotheses. Material must be impartially 
collected and justly dealt with. Conclusions must 
not be drawn until warranted by the evidence. No 
hypothesis may pass to the status of explanation or of 
law until it stands all the tests that can be devised. 
The truth, without regard to the labor involved in at- 
taining it and without regard to the consequences, 



42 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

is the dominant consideration with every real scientist. 
The obvious mental advantage of scientific training is, 
therefore, one in behalf of the powers of observation 
and judgment: its moral advantage consists in impress- 
ing the lesson that truth is to take precedence of all 
else, — our schemes, our tastes, our desires, our preju- 
dices. If to seek truth and to know when it is found is 
a mark that pre-eminently distinguishes a being as a 
human being, the scientific method permits no com- 
parison with other methods. There are others. You 
have only to watch the politician, the theologian, the 
metaphysical philosopher, the literator, to perceive 
what the other methods are. Do not misunderstand 
me. Science has no infallible recipe for making 
superior persons out of hopelessly inferior material. 
It is not difficult to find students and teachers of 
science who are to the last degree unscientific. They 
are called botanists, physicists, astronomers, and so 
on; but their lives, professionally and socially, ex- 
hibit bias, prejudice, and partial judgments. The 
power of calm comparison and estimation of evidence 
seems to be largely, if not wholly, lacking in them. Yet 
I must affirm that, if physics, rightly studied, does not 
make a person accurate, nothing will; if botany, 
rightly studied, does not lead him to observe, nothing 



THE STUDY OP MATHEMATICS 43 

will; if geology, rightly studied, does not train his rea- 
soning powers, nothing will. If all of these together 
do not lead him to set truth above everything else, it 
will probably be in vain to invoke other agencies. 

"Is not mathematics as important as science?" I 
note this question in your reply to my last letter. Let 
us consider. 

In the curriculum of a well-known university the 
prerequisite for one course in mathematics is stated as 
"a. certain facility in abstract reasoning." The framer 
of the prerequisite had a right to use any word he chose, 
but he had no right to employ one in an unusual sense 
without explaining. Mathematics does not require 
"facility in abstract reasoning," as the term reason- 
ing is generally understood; nor does the study of 
mathematics cultivate the power of reasoning. In 
its realm there are no evidences to be gathered and 
weighed, no hypotheses to be framed, no causal rela- 
tions to be searched for, no laws of nature to be dis- 
closed, and no deductions to be made from such laws. 
That is, the opportunity for such training as science 
affords is not afforded at all by mathematics. "We 
train your reasoning power 'while you wait' in the 
mathematical class-room" is one of those standard 
announcements passed on from one generation of 



44 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

teachers to another: it is zealously recited by persons 
who, whatever they may know in mathematics, have 
plainly never given any thought to comparative logic. 
Nevertheless, you should, by all means, learn some 
mathematics. Fortunately, it is the easiest of sub- 
jects to do alone. No libraries, no laboratories, and — 
I might almost add — no teachers are required. 
Neither need you be afraid of missing the way in its 
so-called reasoning. If you run against any serious 
obstacle, the fault is probably in the text-book. Lay 
it aside and try another on the same topic. Among 
the elementary indispensable branches I should put 
the calculus. You ought to know enough of this 
language to be able to read some of the "rhymes of 
the universe" that are written in it. Take a couple 
of hours each morning next summer, you and your 
brother, and you can do enough calculus to serve all 
ordinary purposes. But beware lest you use up your 
time in merely acquiring a fatal facility in work- 
ing exercises. Find some real examples relating to 
falling bodies, to the path of a baseball, to the energy 
of a fly-wheel, and the value of the calculus, as an aid 
in exact science, will need no further emphasis. The 
pathetic feature of study in pure mathematics is that 
the student not only has no idea what it is all for. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 45 

but he is rather proud of the notion that it is not "for" 
anything. To be sure, so far as any one knows yet, 
much of it is not; but some of it is. Under the time- 
honored method the young mathematician adds page 
to page and chapter to chapter, and he is as one 
breaking stones on a road that for him leads nowhere. 
Gamma functions and Fourier's series, he is impres- 
sively assured by his teacher, are used in science. 
Where and how he never finds out, because in his 
eagerness to specialize in mathematics he has failed 
to learn even the rudiments of the sciences that invoke 
the aid of an integral or a series. The undergraduate 
mathematical "specialist" is looked upon with peculiar 
awe by his companions. The admiration commanded 
by his supposed performances exceeds the admira- 
tion that would be caused if, for instance, he read 
Arabic or could stand on his head in the gynmasium. 
Meanwhile, under the workings of the elective system, 
he is probably ignorant of the Laws of Motion — not 
to mention several other laws that it might be to his 
advantage to learn. 

You tell me that your freshman teacher advises 
you to continue mathematics. That is, it is suggested 
that you may become one of the mathematical elect. 
Why this advice? The Latin argument over again: 



46 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

you can succeed in mathematics, and you may want 
to teach it some time. You will recall my letter 
concerning Latin. However, I must add a word 
further. Suppose you do some time teach mathe- 
matics, let us say the algebra and geometry and trig- 
onometry of a high school. In the sequel you will 
understand, if you find it difficult to believe now, 
that pure mathematics is of small use to you in prep- 
aration for that work. It is all-important that you 
know algebra for what it really is, — a language, un- 
rivalled for compactness and freedom from ambiguity, 
for expressing quantitative propositions and conduct- 
ing quantitative discourse. There can be little doubt 
that the difficulties and disgusts, the hours wasted, 
the failures incurred, in its study, are largely owing 
to the grievous lack on the part of the teacher, and 
the text-book, of any insight into the true character 
of algebra. Geometry has its own peculiar ill-treat- 
ment to cry out against. It is rendered formal and 
unreal, a matter of blackboard diagrams, because 
sight is lost of its natural office, — the expression of 
linear relations in our actual environment. These 
difficulties will never be reached and overcome by 
more and higher pure mathematics, but by a prac- 
tical preparation on the teacher's part through study 



THE STUDY OP MATHEMATICS 47 

of those sciences in which algebra and geometry are 
used. A sound first-year course in astronomy will 
incidentally invest solid geometry with an interest 
and obvious value that it cannot possibly otherwise 
acquire. Devise a diagram of your own to prove 
that proposition in Appendix J of Davis' Physical 
Geography, "If a body revolves without rotation, 
every part of it is subject to equal and parallel cen- 
trifugal forces." Begin now to make a collection 
of all the problems of this sort that you can find. 
Practical questions in physics will go far toward res- 
cuing algebra from its present detested status. 

I had slowly counted 12 when we heard a low thud, as if the 
rock had struck the edge of the cliff, then a fainter and fainter 
echo till the last rumbling seemed to die away in the depths of 
the nether world. 

What was the probable depth of the barranca 
where the basalt boulder was rolled in? When you 
come to teach, give your boys and girls this from a 
real book of real travels, and observe its effect on 
their opinion of quadratic equations. The algebra 
book is yet to be written in which the author's first 
endeavor shall be not to make the book merely "in- 
teresting," or easy, or exhaustive, but to reveal to its 
readers the common-sense of algebra. 



SEVENTH LETTER. 

You write that English is given an important place 
in your college. "There are many courses, and they 
are extensively elected." Yes, English is a favored 
and fashionable study. Yet some lookers-on are 
filled with private wonderment and questionings. 
How pleasant it would be if, upon shaking this great, 
spreading English tree, fruit came down of a quality 
to justify so much planting and watering and tend- 
ing! But would any one guess that students were re- 
ceiving all this elaborate training? Listen to their 
conversation! It betrays a meagre vocabulary and 
awkward construction, inability to describe off-hand 
with vigor and accuracy even the simplest thing, or 
give a forceful, compact account of the plainest matter. 
You may reply that "English" is a training in writ- 
ing. To what end? A person usually communi- 
cates with his fellows by speech; yet the elaborate 
curricula do not include a single practical course in 
conversation. If it is assumed that he who can write 
will consequently be able to speak well, the facts do 
not seem to sustain the assumption. And then, alas! 



ENGLISH AND LITERATURE 49 

they do not write well, — the young people in whose 
interests the English composition courses are pre- 
sumably conducted. In spite of painstaking and 
skill on the teacher's part, composition work is bound 
to be disappointing in the outcome, and this for 
two reasons: English study alone cannot give the 
student anything to say; and, even if it did, it cannot 
make him say it. If you ever have thoughts worth 
expressing, they will spring from soils outside of mere 
language territory; and, if you express them well, 
it will be because you resolve to do so. Let me sug- 
gest that you make such a resolve. Play a solitary 
game to get a working command of vocabulary and 
construction. There is opportunity every time you 
talk. You will need to play the game guardedly. 
The person of commonplace expression will be quick 
to detect and resent the intrusion of anything un- 
usual into conversation. But try! Keep at this self- 
imposed task of acquiring such a command of your 
mother tongue that you may habitually use the right 
word and habitually frame simple, clear sentences. 
If you can achieve this in conversation, you need not 
be anxious over any writing that you are called to do. 
For the purposes of both writing and speaking there 
is probably no better rule than the one suggested 



50 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

by Darwin's practice. "When a sentence got hope- 
lessly involved, he would ask himself, 'now what 
do you want to say?' and his answer written down 
would often disentangle the confusion." 

Just as it is a relief to realize that we are not obliged 
to hold and express opinions on all subjects, so, with 
a sense of going free, it some day occurs to us that we 
may think more than we talk, omitting altogether what 
is mere chatter. "Have you no wit, manners nor 
honesty but to gabble like tinkers?" This sentiment 
is already written conspicuously on one academic wall. 
It would be becoming to others. Try to cultivate wit 
and good manners and good English by seemly and 
fruitful silences. 

Before you meet the requirements and get clear from 
the entanglements of the English wing of the curricu- 
lum, you are likely to be overtaken by the ambition to 
write a "short story" for your college paper. If that 
species of fever attacks you, I hope it may be as short 
as the stories you write, and I further hope that your 
story will not be accepted. One story in print will 
retard your recovery, and to be writing short stories 
while you are a student is several degrees more deplor- 
able than reading them. Reserve story writing for an 
amusement in your later years, a variation from the 
patchwork and cribbage of old ladies. 



ENGLISH AND LITERATURE 5 1 

May I add a word about English literature, since 
you tell me there are very large classes in literature, 
and you are a member of one of them. To these 
classes the professor lectures, and you take notes. It 
is a pleasant and possibly a valuable exercise — for him; 
but what is it for you? Most of what he says is 
opinion as distinguished from fact, and you are a 
sponge soaking up his opinions. The more you admire 
your lecturer for his ability and respect him for his 
learning, the greater the danger that you will simply 
absorb his ideas instead of developing any of your 
own. The young and immature — I suppose I may 
imply that you are young and immature — are the 
ones who suffer most when subjected to a deluge of 
other people's views. "Views," opinions, specula- 
tions, do not afford the mind its natural or suitable 
food, and it is on this ground that objection must be 
made to much that is presented in literature and 
philosophy classes. 

To be telling you what books to read and what the 
books mean is part of the mischievous system kept 
going by well-intentioned persons who desire to im- 
prove their neighbors, especially their young neigh- 
bors, by telling them what to believe, how to behave, 
and how to be happy. Literary paternalism is as bad 



LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 



in its way as governmental paternalism. If another 
can lend you a hand in getting an understanding of 
the binomial theorem, for example, or Avogadro's Law, 
or the precession of the equinoxes, very well; but it is 
not well when any one undertakes to impart to you an 
understanding or "appreciation" of literature. You 
were a fortunate child if you escaped moralizings on 
Robinson Crusoe and interlinear readings of Water 
Babies and a parallel exegesis of Pilgrim's Progress. 
Curled up on the big lounge in your father's library, 
you enjoyed stories and poems. In due time you find 
out for yourself the significance of Tweedledee's view 
of Alice's relation to the Red King's dream, and the 
full import of 

"There was once a little animal, 
No bigger than a fox." 

And you are fortunate to-day if no one comes between 
you and an author. For example, after you have read 
and re-read Walter Scott at intervals of years, and have 
at length some home-grown ideas about his writings, 
you may, for purposes of comparison, not substitution, 
take a look at Chesterton's essay. Do not on any 
account read the essay first. Read and study Scott. 
The same is to be said of every other merely literary 
author who is worth reading at all. Read him. Do 



ENGLISH AND LITERATURE 53 

not read books or listen to lectures about him. The 
authors of Roh Roy and Pickwick Papers, of Henry 
Esmond and Romola, of Les Miserables and War and 
Peace, wrote for you. So also did the authors of the 
Ode on the Nativity and King Lear and the Ruhdiydt, 
of the Spectator papers and Sartor Resartus. They 
were willing to have their books taken for what any 
one could get out of them. That these books should 
be assigned as tasks for "critical study" is perhaps 
sufl&cient explanation of the fact that among students 
the distaste for good literature is as marked as the 
inability to speak good English. 

The above advice is merely part of a more general 
warning. Are you hanging pictures on your walls be- 
cause you hear them praised and other people have 
them? Are you going to concerts to hear music that 
is said to be fine, and speaking enthusiastically about 
it when you don't really care for it ? Are you studying 
Shakespeare and Browning because the other girls do ? 
You must stop all this before your life can become 
wholesome and sincere. There is no short cut to 
culture any more than to learning or wisdom. Other 
persons cannot do your feeling or your thinking. Only 
with the slow growth of years, long years after you 
are out of college, can you attain that richness of life 



54 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

that is popularly supposed to be the easy achievement 
of a brief period of undergraduate study. The only 
regard for pictures, for music, for architecture, for 
scenery, the only interpretation of literature, that can 
be of real value to you is your own, and your own 
depends on temperament, on knowledge, on experi- 
ence, on reflection, — yours, not somebody else's. 

As for the facts brought forward in literature study, 
— names, dates, sources, alliances, influences, — most of 
them are of relatively small value. Others might ac- 
quire more value if the historical background to which 
they belong were itself recognized in its relations to 
what underlies all history, — the facts and principles 
considered in the complex science of sociology. Ge- 
netically viewed, literature is merely a by-product of 
sociological phenomena, and, when teachers of litera- 
ture become students of sociology, a corresponding 
treatment of their subject may be expected. 

The present meddlesome, harmful analysis and in- 
terpretation of literary material is by no means con- 
fined to college lecture rooms. There are platform 
favorites who revel in expounding Dante, Browning, 
Walt Whitman, Stevenson, — any author that comes 
handy, apparently; and a crowd of persons in pursuit 
of ready-made culture admiringly listen. Some years 



ENGLISH AND LITERATURE 55 

ago an English explorer achieved the first ascent of 
Tupungato, a lofty and all but inaccessible peak of 
the southern Andes. With exceptional daring and 
under circumstances of extreme hardship, he reached 
the summit and returned in safety. A few days later, 
at a valley inn, he found a host who had been there 
many years, and "knew all about the mountains." 
Tupungato was mentioned, and he said: "Oh, yes! 
Tupungato. My son knows it quite well. He has 
ascended it many times with ladies from my hotel." 
Do you beware of the nimble and fluent lecturer who 
claims to explore dangerous heights "with ladies." 

Before closing this letter, may I add a word about 
the lecture method of instruction. I wish I could tell 
you to avoid courses in which it is used, but they are 
probably too many and too generally distributed 
throughout your curriculum. In a graduate school the 
lecture is, perhaps, necessary. In a class of under- 
graduates it wastes time and evades furnishing the 
training that the young student sorely needs. The 
teacher who chooses this method knows that the formal 
lecture gives him an imposing appearance before a 
class, and that it is the easiest way to get through the 
hour's work. But telling is not teaching. When your 
college days are ancient history, you may remember 



56 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

that Mr. A was a brilliant lecturer, at least you thought 
so at the time, though you recall very little of what he 
said, and your note-book is permanently stored away 
in the attic. It is just as well that those discourses 
have shrunken to a sentence or two. On the other 
hand, it is the patient, unwearying teacher that you 
will hold in grateful remembrance: the one who 
stood by you in the laboratory and advised you to look 
again and make another sketch, or the other one who 
used to ask, now and then, a suggestive question, not 
so much to "draw you out" as to lead you to turn 
inward to the mind's hidden homestead where alone it 
can thrive and grow. 



EIGHTH LETTER. 

It appears that you must now choose one or two 
principal subjects, and you ask me what to choose. 
I quote from your last letter. "I have to decide by 
Saturday morning. Most of the girls specialize in 
'lit' or language. You write as if I ought to study 
everything excepting literature and language. But, if 
you take so many subjects, they say you are shallow 
and superficial; that you have breadth without depth; 
that you have scattered your efforts and wasted your 
energy and done nothing with thoroughness. First- 
year courses are despised because they are mere intro- 
ductions. You must do consecutive work in some one 
department if you hope to be scholarly. All the upper- 
class students are making extended critical studies in 
chosen lines. At least, they say they are. Now what 
shall I take for my specialty ? Do advise me by return 
mail." 

I knew you would be writing this letter. I have been 
expecting it for months. It is only too true that col- 
lege students are permitted to think that they are 
specializing. Even the term "research" is sometimes 



58 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

used in connection with their efforts. Because I be- 
lieve in specializing when the time is ripe, I must 
deny that it is desirable or possible for immature and 
uninformed persons. The worst of all smatterers is he 
who, on account of his ignorance on the right hand 
and on the left, is unable to appreciate or even detect 
relationships. It is prerequisite to genuinely intensive 
study that foundations shall be laid in the rudiments 
of many subjects, and this is the chief business of your 
undergraduate life. Get just as many of those "mere 
introductions" as you can. Look out in every direc- 
tion. Remember that, if the first year of a subject 
seems to be lacking in opportunity for "thoroughness," 
it is the fault of the treatment, not the fault of the 
subject or the year. You will doubtless be called 
"superficial" by your companions who study French 
and German for years, and at the end know little of 
any value to talk about, even in their own tongue. 
You will be regarded with pity by seniors who are 
giving "special" study to some subject whilst ignorant 
of indispensable antecedent subjects, — doing experi- 
mental psychology, for instance, though ignorant of 
both physics and physiology, — and you will apparently 
be distanced in the race by brisk experts who can read, 
let us say, a book like Wells' Modern Utopia over 



UNDERGRADUATE SPECIALIZING 59 

night, and be ready the next evening to give a critical 
analysis of it. But never mind! Ten years hence, 
when the comparison is made between you and your 
classmate who did so much consecutive work in one 
or two departments, you need not be the one to suffer. 
She will have well-nigh forgotten what she researched, 
and there will be little else by way of supplement. 
You, I hope, will at graduation know the elements of a 
considerable number of subjects, and will be fairly able 
to decide what you wish to continue to a really ad- 
vanced point. You remember you thought you might 
like to be a Latin teacher, and therefore felt that you 
ought to devote yourself to Latin. It may turn out 
that something in that first year of economics leads 
you to consider studying law, or perhaps your one year 
in geology and that general course in zoology results 
in a determination to study palaeontology. We do not 
know yet. We only know there are grave risks of 
never coming to your own as a scholar unless you have 
a fair chance now, and the fair chance means a step 
across the threshold of many open doors. However, I 
hear you repeat: "Yes, but I must have a principal 
subject. I cannot get through college without it." 
Very well, take history. I hasten to add, reduce the 
hours to the least number allowable, and do not en- 



6o LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

gage in the work as if you were going to be a historian. 
So far as possible, let your history be the story of hu- 
man activity, all forms of activity. To indicate what I 
mean, I may say that I should not pass you in this sub- 
ject as a major one unless you are tolerably familiar 
with Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, Drap- 
er's Intellectual Development of Europe, and White's 
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology. If 
:academic courses in history take no account of these 
works, you can, nevertheless, read them by yourself. 
I do not now recall whether you have ever expressed 
;any particular liking for history. From what I have 
■written before, you are prepared to hear me say that 
your likes and dislikes are not germane to the question. 
History, in the large sense in which I am using the 
term, is indispensable. I assume, therefore, that in 
duty to yourself you will study it. 

The protagonists of those who introduced and estab- 
lished the elective system must have hours of misgiv- 
ings if they ever look at the shipwreck made in the 
individual courses of study of many who receive the 
baccalaureate degree. Any fault possibly chargeable 
to the system is supposed to be guarded against by 
that companion scheme, — consecutive study in one or 
two subjects. And the "one or two subjects" may be 



TOTOERGRADUATE SPECIALIZING 6 1 

whatever the student fancies^ — philosophy or literature 
or even music. Proportion^ perspective, present dis- 
cipline, future values, — all these are ignored, and the 
student little suspects how he has defeated his highest 
intellectual interests. The elective system, if not re- 
sponsible for the affectation of scholarship and pre- 
tentious display of youthful "intensive study," affords 
every opportunity for it. Worst of all, it renders pos- 
sible a leisure-class curriculum, largely made up of 
studies whose least fault is that they are mainly orna- 
mental. Students arranging personal courses of study 
of this type give notice that they do not need to acquire 
knowledge of any value or training of any rigor, for 
they are not planning to be of real use in the world. 
They are members of the exempt and privileged order 
who toil only at play and spin only the entangling 
strands of self-indulgence. One may well ask whether 
it is not the immediate duty of the high schools of the 
land to refuse any longer to serve as preparatory schools 
for colleges with conspicuous leisure - class curricula, 
and to supply in the high schools themselves a course 
of study that shall meet the needs of the people to 
whom these schools belong. 



NINTH LETTER. 

Commencement next week, and your undergraduate 
days are about to close. The baccalaureate preacher 
and commencement orator have their addresses already 
written, — at least they know in substance what they are 
going to say. So do I, for there is seldom any marked 
departure from the stereotyped discourse. With flat- 
tering references to your "trained minds" and "stores 
of learning," they will congratulate you young women 
as a superior order of creatures. In graceful language 
they will bid you "go forth" to be blessings in the 
home and the community. For an hour all of you 
will feel unusually elated, but in your four years you 
have heard so many sermons, addresses, and lectures 
that you are now practically immune. Eloquent dis- 
courses before the graduating class will be fatally 
blurred by the toasts of the class supper. May I put 
in one or two remarks — of course equally likely to be 
forgotten — that your distinguished guests will on no 
account make ? Recover yourself from the conceit that 
you are an important person because you are a college 
graduate. That girl who spends the long day tying up 



A BACCALAUREATE NOTE 63 

bread and cakes in a city grocery probably has as good 
a mind as you have, — perhaps a better one. Inquire 
into the circumstances of the great multitude of wage- 
earning young women, then put their circumstances 
alongside those of your classmates. All things taken 
into account, do you think you will have any special 
claim on the high regard and admiration of the com- 
munity by virtue of being an alumna of this or that 
college? Is it so meritorious to be for four years a 
member of the academic club and so highly creditable 
to learn lessons to a passing extent ? You have lived 
for a while in a uniquely constituted community, all of 
whose members have sufficient food and wear good 
clothes, where there is light and warmth, books and 
music and pictures,^ — enough and more than enough; 
where there is exemption from responsibility and from 
the necessity of initiative, and where there is freedom 
from the cares, the sorrows, and the dangers that beset 
many young women's lives. Depart quietly. The real 
test of you is yet to come. And, if you are to verify 
your credentials, you will begin by dismissing, once for 
all, the notion that a sort of ex-officio value attaches to 
you and your doings. 

So far as I have written about your studies, these 
letters are exactly what I should write to your brother. 



64 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

You are both human beings. You alike need the 
knowledge that makes life rich and wholesome, and 
you alike need careful training in observation and in 
the processes of legitimate inference. But over and 
above all this, I must now say something especially for 
you because you are a woman. 

Many persons are reconciled to the woman's college 
and to the woman's presence in other colleges and in 
the universities because, deep in their hearts, they are 
satisfied that a college career will not make any vital 
change in her. She will be mentally dependent and 
biddable just the same. She will be as aimless in her 
life, as much given to personalities, as much occupied 
with the little entertainments and so-called duties of 
the present moment, as if she had never heard of the 
B.A. degree or successfully encountered its conditions. 
She may even be trusted to become a doctor of phi- 
losophy, for she will probably take keen delight in 
bridge whist in spite of a doctorate. College girls have 
their attention directed from time to time to the im- 
portance of little things, — it is a favorite theme when 
girls and women compose an audience. But, once out 
in the world, your enemies, if you have any, need wish 
you nothing worse than this, — that each day shall be 
spent in trifles: idle gossip and idler reverie; the 



A BACCALAUREATE NOTE 65 

new novel, the latest magazine; conventional social 
"duties/' — dressing, calling, dinners; a little church 
work, various women's club functions. Devote your- 
self to these things, and the world that you are "out 
in" will approvingly leave you in peace. That world 
will say it never "hurt you to go to college." But, if 
any large per cent, of women, in college and out, were 
suddenly to manifest a marked determination to be 
intellectually independent and self-reliant, to summon 
custom to account instead of submitting to the tyrant^ 
to set some value on themselves for themselves and for 
the community, dismay would seize the worshippers of 
Things as They Are, and they would scruple at nothing 
to reduce these women to the usual condition of obe- 
dience. 

As regards being useful to your country and to man- 
kind, you may notice that there are two classes of 
service, — the service of relief and the service of recon- 
struction. One is paternal, the other fraternal. One 
is marked by compassion, the other by justice. One 
filters a cup of impure water to make it wholesome; 
the other goes to the fountain head and cleanses the 
stream at its source. One reads to the ignorant; the 
other teaches the ignorant to read. One is satisfied to 
suppress symptoms; the other aims to destroy the dis- 



66 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

ease germs in the body of the community. You can 
make your choice between these classes of service or 
you can take a share in. each. However you may in- 
terpret duty to the community, this much remains 
true: you cannot be too alert in doing one person's 
part to safeguard and promote priceless results that 
characterize our civilization on its non-material side, — 
results that have cost centuries of struggle and sacri- 
fice. "They will burn no more Brunos." They will, 
though, unless everlasting watch be kept. Such pre- 
cious things as free speech and a free press and the 
right of assembly may seem to you secure, at least 
here in your native land. It is not so. Consider your 
own status as a political outlaw. The determination 
to keep you one is ominous of a wider determination 
to deprive, if possible, various classes of men of the 
rights they now enjoy. I may as well warn you that 
the habitual viewing of acts as just or unjust is liable 
to place you, sooner or later, among those who, under 
the compelling power of the idea of democracy, render 
the service of reconstruction. Comradeship with them 
involves certain costs, possible perils. Nevertheless, 
you are to be congratulated if, taking a long look ahead 
and another long look into the past, you accept the 
risk and welcome the comradeship. 



A BACCALAUREATE NOTE 67 

"Where the vanguard camps to-day, 
The rear shall camp to-morrow." 

Besides your life in the world and for it is that life 
with yourself. Perhaps in your reading you have 
already come across these words of Lecky's: — 

Women rarely love truth, though they love passionately what 
they call "the truth," or opinions they have received from others. 
They are little capable of impartiality or of doubt; their think- 
ing is chiefly a mode of feeling; though very generous in their 
acts, they are rarely generous in their opinions or in their judg- 
ments. They persuade rather than convince, and value belief 
rather as a source of consolation than as a faithful expression 
of the reality of things. 

This analysis suggests the most searching examina- 
tion that can ever be made of the effect of academic 
years on one's inmost life. Do you emerge from all 
the opportunities for training and learning only to love 
passionately opinions you have received from others? 
Do you regard persuasion as an allowable substitute for 
conviction, and is your thinking chiefly a mode of feel- 
ing? I look to you to show that it is not so. You are 
called to be one of the women who offer, not a protest 
against Lecky's affirmatives, but evidence that shall 
break down their universal quality. From Hypatia to 
Harriet Martineau and Marie Curie there have been 



68 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE GIRL 

enough such women to afford perpetual inspiration tb 
the rest of us. The life that you entered upon so 
gladly four years ago has justified itself if you have 
really discovered in experience the joy of the search 
for knowledge, and if yours is a free mind at home in 
the universe. 

Until I write again, 

Prosit I 

E. H. 
2418429 



m 7 1909 



